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Students Hack School-Issued iPads Within One Week
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Los Angeles Unified School District started issuing iPads to its students this school year, as part of a $30 million deal with Apple. Now Sam Sanders reports at NPR that less than a week after getting their iPads, high school students have found a way to bypass software blocks on the devices that limit what websites the students can use. The students are getting around software that lets school district officials know where the iPads are, what the students are doing with them at all times and lets the district block certain sites, such as social media favorites like Facebook. 'They were bound to fail,' says Renee Hobbs, who's been a skeptic of the iPad program from the start. 'There is a huge history in American education of being attracted to the new, shiny, hugely promising bauble and then watching the idea fizzle because teachers weren't properly trained to use it and it just ended up in the closet.' The rollout of the iPads might have to be delayed as officials reassess access policies. Right now, the program is still in Phase 1, with fewer than 15,000 iPads distributed. 'I'm guessing this is just a sample of what will likely occur on other campuses once this hits Twitter, YouTube or other social media sites explaining to our students how to breach or compromise the security of these devices,' says Steven Zipperman. 'I want to prevent a "runaway train" scenario when we may have the ability to put a hold on the roll-out.' The incident has prompted questions about overall preparations for the $1-billion tablet initiative."
Good thing they didn't waste $1 billion on teachers or books.
- whose school district had gotten all the kids iPads. She was complaining that the new toys, in conjunction with all the stupid assessments she had to do, had put her weeks behind the curriculum because she had to spend all her time helping her third graders learn to use the tablets. So I'm sure the teachers in CA who got stuck with this are frustrated about this and probably the ones who are now on delay are greatly relieved.
Personally, I think that money could better be spent on good old fashioned computer labs. A good student PC is a heck of a lot cheaper, and these kids need to learn to type on a real keyboard or else they're going to be at a huge disadvantage compared to their peers who do.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Kids bypassing security is a total failure for this program? Come onnnn. If anything it's giving them a reason to want to use them more and learn a little something about technology and security. But I guess they're not satisfied unless they have properly trained obedient creatures, not humans with the ability to think for themselves.
I also hope they find and disable the software that is spying on them.
the refrence from my snide comment in case anyone thinks its too tinfoil:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9159278/Pa._school_district_denies_spying_on_students_with_MacBooks
There's no reason they can't block everything from the network end. Host.deny
There's no reason to police what the students do at home either. That's just big brother and between the parents and students.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Basically I could have told them this was going to happen because of how iOS is designed. We have about 200 and they don't leave our buildings (most of them are in classroom sets/charging carts) and I'd say at least 5-10 a week have to be factory reset because the kids remove the profile and lock the devices.
How is it this easy? Well since iOS (Android has this same issue and more, sadly), unlike say, ChromeOS, isn't designed to be managed from an enterprise level. So everything we do with policies can simply be removed by the user. No password required.
We tried the carrot and stick approach, the main profile contains the WiFi password, which they don't know, so when they remove it the devices drop off the network and are basically useless. This probably stops most of the folks from messing with them too much but we still have a few that just want to watch the world burn.
However if you GIVE them to the kids, and let them take em home where they can use their own personal WiFi (even worse if they know the password for the school owned wifi) then the carrot is gone. There is little-no incentive for them to leave the iPad's locked down.
This is why we've stopped buying iPads and started buying ChromeBooks. I hope Apple (and Google's Android group, too) takes note, were far from the only district going this direction.
Should have happened within the first 30 minutes after the first iPad was issued out to the first student.
Snowball in hell
Sound of eyeballs getting reall big
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
the analog version of the chemistry E-Book has also been hacked. an enormous toothbrush mustache has been rendered in analog on Marie Curie making her look exactly like hitler...a clear violation of our zero tolerance policy.
Good people go to bed earlier.
It probably was hacked within 30 minutes by the more clever students. It just took it a little longer to get around to everyone else.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
OK, so now the Ipads are more useful, now with FB the kids can better collaborate with their classmates.
the whole idea of Ipads or any type of tablet was stupid and counter productive to begin with, but the ability to "hack them" does not change that.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The alternative attitude is what happened recently in my hometown, where a student was nearly suspended for possessing "hacking tools" - a Linux live-cd.
Part of the purpose of schools is to be a safety net, where irresponsible kids can test their limits and, while not getting away with anything fully, they are shielded from the worst repercussions and are given gentle encouragement that they are not supposed to be doing that. Unfortunately, that attitude doesn't mix with the "freedom is doing anything I want" or the "kids should be imprisoned in schools until they are perfect adults" mentalities that are so popular today, and it's made even more complex (as is everything else) by the ever-expanding community boundaries brought about by modern technology.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
That's how it was with the TI-83's the school distributed to us... a handful of us figured out how to make them do more than just classwork within a few days at most, but it didn't get to the rest of the kids or teachers until near the end of the school year.
Same shit, different generation.
Hacking the iPad is not an issue. The real issue is that an iPad is a very poor instrument for teaching. It's a consumption tool (like a glorified TV). The idiots that approved this were short sighted.
As others have said. A PC is cheaper and far more powerful, particularly for content creation - where the grey matter is actually stretched.
The problems in education in the US are not about the supplies the kids have, and the iPads, while great for publicity, won't have much effect on student achievement.
The big problems have a lot more to do with:
- A lack of pre-K education for a lot of kids means that many start about 2-3 years behind. For example, I was one of two students who walked into first grade able to read at all, count, and add. Head Start and similar programs could help with that, but they've never come close to having the funding they'd really need to solve that problem, and parents are often completely unaware that that sort of thing even exists.
- Teachers are poorly paid compared to other professions requiring similar levels of education, so we don't have our smartest people opting to become teachers. For example, someone who's good at math or science, and good at explaining it to other people, could choose to get an engineering degree and make about $85K a year, or go into teaching and make about $50K a year. Which would you expect them to choose?
- The school districts that desperately need the best teachers are not the same districts as can afford the best teachers. Teachers, like most people, opt to work for places that pay them well if possible, and that means wealthy suburban districts can get better staff than poor urban or rural districts. But generally speaking, the poor kids are the ones who could most use a really good teacher to give them a chance to not be poor.
- For students in minority cultures, education is not always seen as a path to financial success, because (certainly historically, and seems to be still at least partially true) educated people in that minority do not necessarily get the jobs they are qualified for. If education isn't a path to success, then many students will be motivated to just muddle through until either they graduate or drop out, because either way they're going to be flipping burgers for a living if they are lucky enough to get a job.
None of that will be solved with iPads, just like none of that was solved by Apple giving out Apple II's to a lot of schools back in the 1980's.
I am officially gone from
Because when something is paid for with grant money, no one gives a shit what it costs. And "iPad" is a lot easier to understand on a grant application than "Obscure tablet that the grant evaluators have probably never heard of."
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
I was in high school when Macintoshes were new; they had a laser printer and several dot matrix printers. Laser printing was more expensive at the time, but the queue was shorter due to less people on it and shorter print times. Our computer lab teacher would watch us, literally right over our shoulders, as we'd try to bypass his security (like you, I think "hack" is too grand a word here) and permissions. By the end of the second day, my two best friends and I and a couple of our other friends all had boot disks with LaswerWriter permissions. The teacher had a great attitude that really fostered learning the technology, and was consistent with him watching over our shoulders while we tried to do things we weren't supposed to be able to do (and in every case I can remember, succeeded): he didn't care as long as you didn't make more work for him by breaking something. He was content to learn what we were up to. We had pretty much carte blanche in the computer lab to do whatever we wanted as long as we were learning something new every day, and we'd write a brief summary report at the end of the week. One day, we learned how to hex edit savegames for some old RPG, using the same sorts of techniques we were using on our C64s at home, but with a proper hex editor rather than a C64 sector editor. They were saved in something weird like octal reversed digits instead of the standard reversed hex or forward hex. I can't recall which game it was, only that it had multiple windows up. A quick Google image search doesn't show me anything familiar.
It sounds like the school districts (either because their IT staff are monumental idiots, or, probably more likely, because nobody budgeted in anything for "device management" because 'Hey, iPads are easy!') were just using Exchange activesync restrictions, which are... more or less worth what you pay. Delete the (probably boring) school email account, and away you go. By Fucking Design.
The various Apple-blessed 'MDM' services (either 3rd party contract types, or in-house on the ridiculous hardware that Apple calls 'servers' these days) are incrementally more robust; but iPads are fundamentally aimed at 'user-is-owner' scenarios, with Apple occasionally throwing a crumb and a contemptuous sneer in the direction of anything else.
(Incidentally, that's one thing that surprises me about 'WinRT'. Microsoft, fuck man, You Could Have Had The Tablet With Native Active Directory Support. But you didn't. You voluntarily removed that feature. Are you totally insane? That's one area, at least, where you could have blown the pitiful excuses for 'device management' in the competing ecosystems to hell and back; but no. Not a default, not even an option you can buy... What were you thinking?)
iPads are fundamentally aimed at 'user-is-owner' scenarios
In most cases they appear to aimed more squarely at the 'Apple is owner' scenario.
What exactly do the students(what age/grade?) do with these devices(iPads/Chrome Books)?
How does the device improve/aid learning over more traditional teaching tools(I presume books vs. ereaders)?
How much more does the technology program cost than the previous traditional methods?
I'm presently watching my "child" attending university. I am noticing a significant, near massive, loss in learning productivity due to online books, multiple guess homework assignments, and tests. There are at least six different sites for the various functions that all look and behave differently, all have a significant fee attached and all provide little to no value over a book and a test paper. While I am seeing a serious decline in their learning, I am seeing a massive increase in expenditure to access their book online, to gain access to homework assignments, to gain access to the testing site, to have and use a "clicker" in order to "participate" in class(required for grade) by responding in a massive online multiple guess(MOMG) fashion to the prof's questions.and more. Yet, despite the obvious decline in learning, the kids(not just mine) think "it's great because I can do my homework on my phone!" (and fail).
All the while, the state university system is announcing the eminent implementation of all online degrees. They see it as a major source of revenue and a means of significantly increasing their enrollments without increasing facilities cost. "It's going to be so totally awesome for learning and for the kids". BULLCRAP!
True, true. I really should have said that Apple is the owner; but makes it very difficult for its vassals to enforce any restrictions on their vassals. Everyone is supposed to be a direct vassal of Apple, with only the most token support given to situations where somebody wants to farm out a large quantity of iPads to people under their organizational control.
Technology in the classroom...all of it...it's just **tools to teach**
Anyone who things technology can reduce staff budget or allow larger class sizes is smoking crack.
A professionally trained, well-paid *human* teacher is absolutely the only thing that educates a child.
Everything else is just a tool.
Thank you Dave Raggett
It probably took the students 10 minutes to kill the lock-down and the school a week to notice.
iPads are not designed for the Enterprise, let alone for the classroom...
Teachers don't need more gadgets getting in the way of teaching...
What were they thinking?
Teachers need to teach, not be the first-line of the Help Desk.